Since the 1960s many instruments, in paper form, exchanged by banks have been encoded using machine recognizable characters, for example those encoded with magnetic ink. Typically, characters representing bank branch, and account information are pre-printed in magnetic ink on the instrument. Other information, such as payee, and amount may also be printed on the instrument in magnetic ink, as required. Certified checks, for example, often include amount information, printed in magnetic ink, by a bank issuing branch. Magnetic ink characters are magnetically and optically recognizable.
Conveniently, magnetic ink characters lend themselves to machine recognition—referred to as magnetic ink character recognition (MICR). MICR still tends to be more accurate than optical character recognition (OCR).
Not surprisingly, magnetic ink characters are now also in use on other machine readable documents, such as invoices, passports, parking tickets and the like.
At present four fonts, MICR E-13B, CMC-7, OCR-A and OCR-B are commonly used to represent magnetic characters.
Notwithstanding the ease of recognition of the magnetic ink, errors do still occur. In particular, when documents are processed at very high speeds (many documents/second), machine recognition errors may occur. Additionally, when documents are further processed, such as by document image capture (which happens at a different processing point), the opportunity for MICR data to become misaligned with captured image(s) capture can occur. This may occur when documents are not-realigned properly, after a jam or similar disruption.
In recent years, modern document processing techniques further electronically image and archive paper documents for customer convenience and archival purposes. Conveniently, optical character recognition of portions of the images may be used to verify MICR data. Discrepancies between MICR and OCR data for the same characters may be flagged and resolved by operator intervention.
Unfortunately, OCR is also not 100% accurate. As such, OCR may introduce additional errors that will be flagged as OCR/MICR discrepancies. Individually, such errors may be tolerable. However, when significant numbers of documents are processed and unnecessarily flagged, document processing time and labour requirements are increased.
These problems are not unique to verification of MICR data with OCR data, but can also occur any time machine recognized data recognized using a first machine recognition process is verified using a second machine recognition process: are discrepancies in the verification a result of errors in the verification data or in the data being verified?
Accordingly, there is a need to more effectively verify machine data recognition.